MR. ASQUITH.

In regard to Home Rule, the Premier said, the situation would have been worse. “Suppose that we had reintroduced Home Rule as a Liberal Government, and gone back to the situation of 1914, when we agreed that Home Rule should be placed on the Statute Book only on conditions that it should be seriously amended. If party warfare had been renewed on the initiation of the Liberal Party the Unionist party would have been tempted to resist the new policy with the full power of their old hostility to Home Rule, and that hostility would have been strengthened by the record of Ireland during the later years of the war. I do not want to go back on that record, but it contains some serious blots. Would not the Unionist party have reminded us of the championship which Sinn Fein gave to Germany at the critical moment of the struggle? Why, the irreconcilable section of the Unionist party, as voiced in the Morning Post, is even now making that reminder day by day. If we had had no Coalition that protest would have been the prevailing voice of the Unionist opposition, and we should have been farther from an Irish settlement than we are to-day.”

Harold Spender: But the Asquithians allege that they would, if they came into power, carry ’Dominion Home Rule,’ which would be an advance on any Irish policy yet promoted by a British Government. What do you say to that?”

Prime Minister: “Well, I asked Mr. Asquith in the House of Commons to tell me what he meant by ‘Dominion Home Rule,’ and he refused to reply to my question. I do not think that that was quite fair, or worthy of his great Parliamentary reputation. It is all very well for an Opposition to play with those terms. They can talk in phrases. I have to talk in Acts of Parliament.